Monday, August 3, 2009

ABC's John Stossel on National Healthcare

This is a great report from John Stossel. In it, he also mentions the problem that innovation will be killed off without the ability for firms an individuals to profit from there innovations. I have mentioned this as a key problem of a national healthcare system, outside of Stossel, I have seen little mention of this great problem. If Obamacare passes, it is likely that we will have peaked as far as innovation, for a very long time, perhaps forever.

8 comments:

Sorry, but I don't trust him because of his own agenda. Innovation won't be stifled because in many cases it's the government that pays for research! We rank 37th in the world in terms of how we take care of our own citizens. And the control the health insurance bureaucrats have right now is far, far worse than a Medicare-style reform. I'm on Medicare and I know the government isn't going to deny me a life-saving procedure--but the health insurance company will do it so a CEO can get rich.

"Sorry, but I don't trust him because of his own agenda"That really scary Libertarian agenda. You know the one that says it is wrong to use force to take money from your neighbor. Doing that is theft. Theft is wrong. Even if it is the Government doing it.

"Sorry, but I don't trust him because of his own agenda"That really scary Libertarian agenda. You know the one that says it is wrong to use force to take money from your neighbor. Doing that is theft. Theft is wrong. Even if it is the Government doing it.

Healthcare is not a right. We do need to find a solution but one payer plan from the government is not an ideal plan. The government can and will deny benefits. Look at the new plan, due to age or condition you may not be deemed appropriate for a life saving procedure. Please name one government agency that generates revenue?

He is arguing that it is the profit motive that has made heath care the marvel that it is today. The marvel is the ridiculous cost, exactly what you would expect where lives can legally be ransomed for whatever price the market will bear.

The way the USA got to be first in the world in nearly everything, including medicine, is that for the entire 19th Century the USA had almost no government to speak of. People here were free to seek their own success while risking their own failure. The result was a backwards agrarian nation becoming the world's foremost economic powerhouse, while at the same time Europe's Renaissance (which started due to a similar condition in the Italian city states) withered into the centralized European nation-states.

This is basic history if you care to look at it, and basic economics too.

Let's get the government out of health care financing AND health care research and see what those dollars can do in competent hands. Innovation is *already* stifled because the government now takes half your income in addition to mountains of freshly printed money and spends it foolishly, taking resources from the rest of the system. Your solution of giving even *more* control to the government only compounds the existing problem.

And if you're really worried about insurance companies screwing you, then maybe what you really want is more power to juries and less to lawyers/judges. If you feel screwed by the fine print in the contract then a jury will surely feel the same way.

I have lived in a former communist country for the past 10 years. I was looking forward to going back to health care in the US...at least until now. The report is absolutely true. In the socialist health care system where I live now there are long waits and they do not practice "advanced" medicine. Why should they when the doctors are paid the same as a common laborer and the government controls how everything is spent? America, if you think insurance companies are bad, just wait till the government takes control.

Absurd, EB. Health care was the best in the world back when it was market-based. Only after the introduction of socialist crimes against humanity like Medicare/Medicaid did costs skyrocket and rationing begin. Under full government control, things could only possibly get worse.